The guild alliance that works

About four weeks ago, and formed a guild raiding alliance to tackle ICC 25. This alliance got its legs back in ToC25, when we joined up in an informal manner to help leverage ’s raiding skills with ’s larger raid pool. After some initial rocky starts, we managed to regularly clear the instance, and even managed to get the farming run down to a fairly reasonable time.

When ICC came out, we faced the decision of trying to stay on top of the now cleared 10 man strict rankings released by Guild-Ox, or forging a new alliance to get the gear from the 25 mans. We went back and forth quite a bit over this decision, but ultimately we decided to plow ahead and give it a go.

I’ll detail our reasoning below, but we knew going into this that we needed a tighter control over the raid than we had in ToC. Our raiding style is markedly different than that of , and we needed to make sure that we were all operating from the same page. We drew up a list of our expectations, negotiated some details, and away we went.

The rocky start

Like most collaborative efforts, our alliance wasn’t all roses and candy at the start. We had some issues, with either player capability, or with player availability. I’m pretty sure our first raid started about 10-15 min late, and we had a ton of random afk’s after every Saurfang wipe. Fortunately the two GMs work together to resolve any issues, and it’s been fairly smooth sailing.

Our contract and expectations

Our contract was laid out with one specific purpose in mind – to keep the same 25 people showing up every week for ICC content. Nothing hurts progression more than having to teach the same fight over and over, because Joepally decided he didn’t want to go that week. To help enforce this, we setup a set roster of players that would be invited every week. As an incentive, any guild who had a member no-show was either responsible for providing an equally geared replacement. Failure to do so results in a 2k gold fine to the guild. Not a bad deal really.

Our contract covered loot, legendaries, tier tokens, etc. Flasks are mandatory for all boss fights, and there’s always a fish feast. Saronite is /rolled on for the first one, and then alternated between GMs after that. BoE epics have to be equipped and then socketed with some green gems we carry specifically for this purpose (or enchanted).

How we’ve done

With just 12 hours of raid time (4x3 hour sessions) we’ve managed to clear the Lower Spire, Festergut, and Rotface. Are we a little late to the party? Sure, but we’re certainly being fashionable about it. Our pulls now start exactly on time, and much of the original fuss has dissipated. A few folks have been replaced due to poor performance, and that’s really woken the whole team up. I do consider the steady raid group to be a major part of our success, and I have to tip my hat to the GMs that pulled it off.

This week we’ll be heading into the Blood Wing, and with any luck we’ll notch up the Princes and maybe Dreamwalker before we start taking on stage bosses. It’d be interesting to see what we could accomplish if we added a second night to the schedule, but I’d only do that if it was the same raid team. Adding new members every day is ftl.